What is East Jerusalem?

Ir Amim contains a lot of useful information about the legal status of East Jerusalem, including such things as the use of the law to strip Palestinian rights.
Here is one bit, but view the entire website.
Seventeen days after the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel redrew the boundaries of Jerusalem, annexing 70 km² to the city’s area. The considerations that informed the new boundaries reflected the composition of the planning committee, which included military men and politicians:

Settler Gets 18 months for kidnapping–was it justice?

“According to Yesh Din’s data, about 90 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians against Israeli citizens who harm them and their property end without any indictments….The case is one of the most severe cases ever handled by human rights group Yesh Din – the kidnap and assault of a Palestinian 15 year old boy of the West Bank village of Kusra. The boy was kidnapped by two assaulters near the Esh Kodesh outpost. The two offenders battered him, and left him naked, wounded, and bound in an open field.”
From Yesh Din
A settler has now been sentenced to 18 months for kidnapping and torture of that Palestinian youth–there is debate over what appears to be a very light sentence as compared to what a Palestinian would get for the same act.

Why give voice to bigots?

Why are the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald giving voice to an Islamaphobe?
The Age and SMH have published a velvet-voiced piece by Mark Durie which to those who don’t know better, looks like an accurate portrayal of violence in Islam. There are two key things, however, missing in the article.
First, an acknowledgment that much of the contemporary response of Islam to the West is bound up in a response to centuries of domination and imperialism by the West in parts of the world where Islam has been a majority religion.
And second, what Durie argues is a hardwired violence in Islamic thinking could be equally argued about the intolerance in Christian theology and practice over the centuries (and which still goes on, for example, to justify violence agains ‘communists’ in Latin America by born again dictators. In fact, Muslim fundamentalists argue precisely this.

Innocent Prisoners in Our Midst

Keep children of refugees in detention is outrageous and an offense against human rights. Hear about it at Get Up . It has nothing to do with security, but everything to do with dog whistle and lowest common denominator politics.

AJDS condemns murders in Itamar

The AJDS deplores the murder of the Fogel family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. This is a horrific crime and heartrending tragedy for the community in which it occurred.
We hope that the person or people responsible will be apprehended and brought to justice.
AJDS Executive, 15 March 2011.

The activist Left must condemn the murder of the Itamar family

Dimi Reider on the Israeli +972 blog site. Didi lays it on the line about the hypocrisy of some on the left (including the Israeli left) won’t call a spade a space.
This doesn’t mean that you cannot remain opposed to the Occupation and the disempowerment of Palestinians and all that goes with it. It does mean however, that you cannot support brutal violence and murder from anyone in either community. It hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work now. Many Palestinian organisations have denounced this act, yet the Netanyahu government’s response it to build more homes in the Occupied Territories. And so it goes.

The activist Left must condemn the murder of the Itamar family

Dimi Reider on the Israeli +972 blog site. Didi lays it on the line about the hypocrisy of some on the left (including the Israeli left) won’t call a spade a space.
This doesn’t mean that you cannot remain opposed to the Occupation and the disempowerment of Palestinians and all that goes with it. It does mean however, that you cannot support brutal violence and murder from anyone in either community. It hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work now. Many Palestinian organisations have denounced this act, yet the Netanyahu government’s response it to build more homes in the Occupied Territories. And so it goes.

The Rise of Organised Intolerance

Hold the back page! The detailed scoop on the QSociety’s links can be read in New Matilda.
The full version, edited down because of space limitations, includes a discussion of the ‘quite interesting views’ of Bill Muehlenberg of the Australian Family Association and Senator Cory Bernardi (html file, with links).
I don’t know if you can call it a conspiracy, but..be on the alert for this stuff. It reminds me of the propaganda put out by the League of Rights many years ago, ‘reason’ cloaking intolerance that is easy to find, once you scratch the surface. They say they are not racist, just against Muslim extremism, but it all collapses into stereotyping that translates as hatred of the strange and different other. All too familiar.
The academic Paul Gardner spoke of the League of Rights, an ancestor of many right-wing organisations in Australia as using “self-serving definitions, idealistic appeals, obfuscation, innuendo, illogic, blaming (or accusing) the victim, distortion and group libel”, and QSociety like other groups (including the Christian Democratic Party), seems to be using quite the same tactic. [see the excellent survey of the history of the right in Australia by Andrew Moore, from where Gardner’s quote is taken. The League too, had some strong links to conservative churchmen and theology]

The Rise of Organised Intolerance

Hold the back page! The detailed scoop on the QSociety’s links can be read in New Matilda.
The full version, edited down because of space limitations, includes a discussion of the ‘quite interesting views’ of Bill Muehlenberg of the Australian Family Association and Senator Cory Bernardi (html file, with links).
I don’t know if you can call it a conspiracy, but..be on the alert for this stuff. It reminds me of the propaganda put out by the League of Rights many years ago, ‘reason’ cloaking intolerance that is easy to find, once you scratch the surface. They say they are not racist, just against Muslim extremism, but it all collapses into stereotyping that translates as hatred of the strange and different other. All too familiar.
The academic Paul Gardner spoke of the League of Rights, an ancestor of many right-wing organisations in Australia as using “self-serving definitions, idealistic appeals, obfuscation, innuendo, illogic, blaming (or accusing) the victim, distortion and group libel”, and QSociety like other groups (including the Christian Democratic Party), seems to be using quite the same tactic. [see the excellent survey of the history of the right in Australia by Andrew Moore, from where Gardner’s quote is taken. The League too, had some strong links to conservative churchmen and theology]

Melbourne Age attacks racist campaign

The Melbourne Age has an account of the events surrounding the Alma Road Community House, as well as an editorial in which the AJDS gets a guernsey for its work.
As the Age says, “Encouragingly, this racist campaign has led some members of the Jewish community to support the prayer group (the Alma Road house is in the heart of a Jewish precinct). The prayer group’s supporters include the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the Jewish Christian Muslim Association, the Australian Jewish Democratic Society and the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC).”
Sign the petition in support of freedom of religion and in support of tolerance.